Imitation Crab
Julie & Julia is the reason I created this blog. It’s not that I was inspired by Julie Powell’s story of becoming an Internet culinary diarist; I was repelled by it. Walking out of the theatre, surrounded by happy, chattering faces, I realized that this pathetic, over-long mess is supposed to represent entertainment for adults (as opposed to “adult entertainment”). It’s made for people who don’t go to movies; who don’t appreciate art or intellect; who consider Friends to be hilarious, groundbreaking television.
On the surface, the film has a lot going for it. It’s not a romantic comedy, though it’s certainly being advertised with the same rote, gooey commercials. Rather, it’s half biopic, half journey-of-discovery-movie, and all “comedy”. Julie & Julia begins in the late 1940s with Julia Child (Meryl Streep) arriving in France at the end of some sort of government career; she’s bored by long days of waiting for her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), to return home from his embassy job, and so decides to become a professional chef. Cut to 2002 New York, where government employee Julie Powell (Amy Adams) struggles with the boredom and heartbreak of handling insurance claims after 9/11. Frustrated by being the only one in her circle of catty, well-to-do friends without ambition or prospects, she sets about becoming a blogger, with a goal of preparing all 541 recipes in Juila Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days.
If you’re a fan of romantic comedies—or just happen to watch a good deal of them—the rest of the picture will be utterly familiar and probably very entertaining. If you’re a fan of biopics, as am I, the rest of the picture will be like listening to a book report based on Cliff’s Notes presented by a cheerleader with short-term memory loss: it’s peppy and occasionally spunky, but all the really interesting, vital information is left out in favor of facile genre-defining plot points. Writer/Director Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail) has created a mash-up of Powell’s bestseller, Julie & Julia, and Julia Child’s book with Alex Prud’homme, My Life in France. The problem is that the Julie Powell story centers on an unpleasant, wholly uninteresting caricature of the New York woman, while the Julia Child story turns a very interesting, historic woman into a bird-voiced caricature of herself. Much has been made of Streep’s portrayal of Child, but watching the film, I couldn’t help but think it was much broader than it should’ve been; Ephron makes the fatal mistake of actually playing Dan Aykroyd’s Saturday Night Live skit—where he parodies Child—in the middle of the movie; keen observers may note very little difference between the quality of the two performances.
I understand that Julie & Julia is not a biopic, and that it is not meant to teach us anything about Julia Child; this is Julie Powell’s story—as such, I suppose it’s perfectly acceptable to treat the Child portions of the film as mere slice-of-life vignettes meant to mirror Powell’s own boring struggles. We never learn anything about Child, such as why someone raised in Pasadena, California sounds like a Dickensian schoolmarm on laughing gas; we never learn what compelled her to become a spy during World War II (in fairness, this information came out only last year); we don’t get anything substantive regarding her relationship with Paul, except that he’s much older and they apparently can’t—or won’t—have children (their relationship is so tender and yet so weird that it comes across as that of a sham marriage between two gay best friends). Instead, we get more Julie than Julia. We see her cry again and again about not having made anything of herself; she whines about her anxiety over boning a duck; we watch her type lame entries on her blog that have as much insight and humor as the average Carrie Bradshaw column—which is to say, none; one scene involving Julie falling victim to a pot of boiling lobsters reminded me of a Swedish Chef skit on The Muppet Show. It’s the filmmaker’s prerogative to ditch facts for whimsy, but, honestly, does it have to be this dumb?
Never mind that we never see Julia Child make the leap to television, where the majority of Americans grew to know and love her (which is akin to doing a Michael Phelps biopic without mentioning the Olympics). The last straw was the movie’s utter failure to develop a sub-plot involving Julia Child’s apparent snubbing of Julie’s blog. This fascinating nugget promised to bridge the two parallel arcs by bringing Streep and Adams face to face, but it was never expounded upon. Instead, the slight was mentioned and dropped, acting as nothing more than an excuse to watch Adams cry again.
There’s a fascinating Julia Child biopic waiting to be made by a writer and director with a real story to tell, and an actress who understands nuance. Julie & Julia is nothing like that film; it’s a fragrant, gorgeously presented quiche stuffed with rat poison.